Now You Are My Soldier by Jack Davies
“I WANT TO GO PARTY it up in Ramallah,” the American says, pronouncing the last three syllables like the name of a Latin lover to be dropped at the end of September. For the last half hour, she’s been holding forth to two Israeli boys in a Tel Aviv café concerning their government’s failings in the West Bank. They have been patiently responding “with all due respect”.
Obnoxious and a poor guest she might have been, but she was on to something with Ramallah. A few days later, I find myself in La Grotta, a 600-year-old Ottoman jail cell repurposed for good times.
I’m invited to take a seat at the freestanding wooden bar in the back corner next to Majd. The owner’s name is Shadi. A broad shouldered, lightly bearded man in a black t-shirt behind the bar who, like some benevolent gas, fills any space he’s put in and could have been a bouncer with a flair for whimsy in another lifetime, he informs me that Majd has been drunk since 2pm: “And drinking since 10, right?”
“Next month I will get married and move to Lille, in France, and then I will study music production in Berlin and escape this apartheid,” Majd says.
Majd is bald and has three stars tattooed on his neck and won’t stop smiling. Shadi is to be his best man. They joke later that he will be the only representative of Majd’s friends and family at the ceremony in France. Except, of course, it’s not really a joke. It’s the truth.
Shadi is a songwriter and music is important to La Grotta’s regulars, who are all gathered at the bar shouting song requests at whoever is nearest the computer. The collaborative playlist is eclectic, and not in the way people who mistake their vinyl collection for a personality use the word.
When I arrive, Shadi is playing the Dropkick Murphys’ Rose Tattoo. Why is it, I ask him, that all the best Irish music is made by people who aren’t really Irish?
“But they are Irish,” he says.
Sure, I say, in the sense every American believes they’re Irish because their grandfather sniffed a Guinness once.
“All Americans are Irish,” Shadi says. “Or Italian. Think about it, there’s no such thing as an American.”
I concede that there may be the germ of something in what he’s saying.
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Read the rest of this haunting tale by Jack Davies in SN15: Black Friday – coming out November 23rd!